Electric Vehicle

Nuvve – Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) in Denmark

NUVVE is an energy storage company providing an economical and environmentally sound system to support electrical ancillary services such as regulation, spinning reserve and leveling for intermittent renewable energy sources. Nuvve’s proprietary “Vehicle to Grid” or “V2G” Aggregation solution transforms electric vehicles from simple loads on the electric grid into dispatchable energy storage resources by enabling the vehicle to send excess energy stored in its battery back to the grid upon request. The aggregation of hundreds of electric vehicles allows Nuvve to participate in ancillary service markets with power capacity comparable to traditional generators.

V2G aggregation is not only ideal for ancillary services and demand response, it also promotes the use of renewable energy, boosts energy diversification, and helps reduce greenhouse gases by offering a cost effective storage solution for wind and solar energy production.

NUVVE provides a full Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) solution including hardware, software, and services for successfully connecting utility infrastructure to electric-drive vehicles. For vehicles equipped with an AC Propulsion or other electric drive train capable of bi-directional power flow, there is no need to change any hardware. At the most, a simple software switch adjustment gives electric vehicle owners the capability to be aggregated by Nuvve right away and bring revenue immediately.

Electric cars are not so common these days, but if they make enough financial sense, we’ll see them flooding cities soon enough. As Denmark is currently the country which profits the most from wind power, Nuvve, the U.S.-based company that created the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system, has announced that it will start using Denmark’s electric vehicles as buffers for stabilizing the grid frequency.

New York will also start at the end of this month a flywheel-based approach of grid regulation, but Nuvve has the advantage that their V2G technology doesn’t need huge investments, since the electric car lithium ion batteries are already paid for by the owners, and they’re only using them for short periods of time, while the electric cars rest unused. They’ll start testing on a sample of 30 electric cars, for the moment.

The electric car users who will put their electric cars at the disposal of Nuvve will get paid for the electricity they upload a subsidized price, much higher than the normal cost of electricity. Because the electric vehicles will stay parked for about 95% of the time, this will be easy money. The company estimated that a total of $10,000 will be paid to a single user throughout the electric car’s entire lifetime, which somehow reduces the actual cost of the car itself, eventually.

“For a long time, we’ve been talking about the electric car as an integrated, stabilizing factor in the intelligent grid,” Clean Tech Investment Manager Anita Kjøller Nielsen from Invest in Denmark, Silicon Valley says. “But the partners that we introduced to Nuvve all but agreed they had not expected this technology to be ready for another 4-5 years. Nuvve launching in Denmark now not only creates jobs, it also helpsstrengthen Denmark’s green technology cluster and its position as one of the leading smart grid nations in the world.”

As I’ve said, there are numerous other ways in which electricity can be stored for use at peak demands, but this one seems the most flexible of all. Flywheels, batteries or even the now obsolete natural gas generators won’t be able to encourage the use of electric vehicles more than V2G-like systems will be able to. Nuvve is already setting its offices in Denmark, not in the U.S., and this is certainly a huge leap forward for the Europeans.

www.nuvve.com/